American Tropic

Luz skids to a stop in front of the pyramid-shaped bat tower. Behind her, Deputy Detective Moxel pulls up in his late-model Ford Victoria police car. They both cut their engines and jump out.

Moxel cocks a hand above his eyes to block the sunlight glaring off the tower as he surveys the situation. He puts on his sunglasses. “I don’t see anything going on—place is deserted. Why’d they radio an urgent homicide dispatch? We’re even out of Key West jurisdiction up here.”

Luz doesn’t answer; she hurries toward the tower. Moxel follows with a scowl. They both step under the massive wooden support struts of the tower’s broad base. Luz looks up into the shadowy interior of the ascending wooden shaft and points. “There’s our customer.”

Moxel pushes in close to Luz and stares up. At the top of the pyramid’s narrowing peak hangs a human body. He grabs Luz’s arm and pulls her away. “Let’s get out of here and call for backup.”

Luz shakes loose from Moxel. She grips the first slat of a ladder fixed to the side of the tower. “I’m going up.” She starts climbing the ladder, hand over hand, pulling herself into the higher reaches.

Moxel watches Luz climbing farther away and shouts: “You crazy? Could be somebody’s baiting a trap with that body. I said we should call for backup.”

Luz stops climbing. In the stifling air of the narrow shaft, she wipes sweat from her forehead. She looks back at Moxel below. He seems distant and insignificant. She pulls her pistol out of its holster. She continues climbing into even hotter air. Buzzing flies whiz around her. She waves her pistol at the oncoming flies, and the sudden shift of her body weight puts pressure on the supporting wood slat of the ladder beneath her feet. The slat gives way and tears out with a creaking rip. Luz drops her gun and grabs the slat above her with both hands. She hangs suspended in the air, her legs swinging beneath her. She looks at the slat above that she is hanging on to; the rusty nails securing it begin slowly pulling out.

The sound of Moxel’s angry voice rises through the shaft. “Goddamn, I told you to wait. Hold on, I’m coming.”

Luz looks down as Moxel makes his way up the ladder. He carefully climbs from one wood slat to the next until he reaches her.

Moxel grabs Luz’s dangling legs. “I’ve got you. Let your weight shift onto me. I’m a strong guy, I’ll get you down.”

“No. I’m going up.”

“You can’t. This is a trap. Somebody loosened the nails on these slats to kill anyone trying to get to the body.”

“Keep your grip on my legs and push me up so I can grab on to the next slat.”

“I can’t do that. Our combined weight will rip out the slats and we’ll fall.”

Luz’s brown eyes narrow into severe slits. She speaks in a guttural growl. “That’s an order, goddamn it. Boost me up!”

Moxel tightens his hold around Luz’s legs. “Okay, but you’re going to kill us both.” He grunts and boosts her.

Luz grabs on to the next slat, pulling the weight of her body higher until she is able to gain a foothold on the lower slat.

Moxel calls after her, “You don’t have a gun.”

Luz looks back down. “Stay where you are and keep me covered.”

Moxel pulls his gun from its holster and aims it up.

Luz keeps climbing until she reaches just below the pointed peak of the tower; she stops. She tries not to inhale the overwhelming stench suddenly engulfing her. From the crossbeam rafter above swings the naked body of a man hung by a rope noosed around his neck. The man’s face is a puffed-up purple blotch. Slimy maggots worm out from the orbs of his chalk-white eyes. His ears have been cut off. His pale lips are sewn shut with fishing line. The pallid skin of his body is spotted with green flies sucking at caked flecks of blood. A steel spear is pierced through the man’s chest and out his back. A red X is slashed on the skin of his stomach.



Thick brown hard roots of towering Spanish laurel trees heave up the sidewalk ahead of Noah in an uneven roll of cracked cement. The sidewalk glimmers in the morning mist coming in from the sea. He follows the sidewalk with the deliberate movements of a rum-soaked man overcompensating for his off-balance gait, as if he was on an invisible surfboard riding a serpentine wave. Ahead of him, the massive leathery trunk of another Spanish laurel has not only cracked the sidewalk but completely lifted and shattered the cement-covered ground in its mighty thrust skyward, throwing dark limbs out to block the sun. From the tree’s overhead branches, tendrils of airborne roots cascade back to earth, forming a roped curtain that swings in front of Noah. He pushes through the dripping curtain of vegetation. A three-story tropical mansion of imposing white clapboard comes into view. The mansion is the last of the many that were built in the nineteenth century, when the island was the wealthiest place in America, a bustling port for merchant clipper ships. The ships, loaded with silk, gold, lace, and pewter, had sailed down the Florida Strait, then hugged the narrow channel along the jagged reef and put into Key West’s safe harbor at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico. The mansion, built by a mercantile-marine millionaire, has been battered and besieged by storms, its wood shutters slammed and splintered by high winds. The elaborately carved spindles of the second-story balcony circling the exterior have been shrunk by the sun and snapped in half. The tin-stamped roofs of the cupolas rising above the second story on all four corners are rusted through; past rains have entered and begun the process of a rotting collapse.

Noah weaves up to the front of the decaying structure through a spectacular riot of overgrown exotic fauna. At the entrance stand two tall faux-Roman columns, their white plaster surfaces crumbling and chipped. He walks between the columns, pushing through more entangled vines onto a dilapidated, termite-decimated porch. The stained-glass fanlight window above the weather-beaten mahogany door is spider-webbed with cracks, threatening to shatter and crash down. The door is slightly ajar. Noah pushes it open and enters a cavernous foyer. He is surrounded by overstuffed chairs and sofas shrouded in musty dust-covered sheets. From the center of the room, a circular staircase ascends, its lustrous pecan-wood steps now buffed to a dusty dung color. He climbs the rickety staircase, which is only one loose board away from collapsing.

At the top of the staircase, Noah stops and waits for a moment, then walks down a long hallway lined by dark cypress wood. At the end of the hallway, tall arched windows are open to the sea. He looks through an open doorway into a bedroom. He sees Lareck, a once-formidable and celebrated painter now ancient and, like his mansion, barely resembling past glories. Lareck reclines in his pajamas on top of the rumpled sheets of a bed, a large sketchpad propped up on his knees. He dips a brush into the open box of watercolors next to him and paints in quick, intuitive flourishes on the pad.

Facing Lareck, from across the room in front of an expansive bay window, is Zoe, caught by a shaft of vivid sunshine. The light dapples off her high-boned cheeks. She wears a strapless white dress, exposing the tan of her smooth bare shoulders and long legs.

Lareck continues his painting of Zoe as he speaks with a rolling Southern twang; his voice rises and falls in a rush of smoothed-off syllables that nearly become a high-pitched whine. “My dear muse and inspiration, loosen those lips. I don’t want you looking like Whistler’s sour-puss mother.”

Zoe licks her lips, shifts her weight, and moves slightly. “Is this better?”

“That’s it. Turn to the right. I want more light on you. Your skin shines with promise. A lifetime of painting, and I still chase the promise.”

Zoe turns to a sharper profile angle in the shaft of sunlight. “Like this?” The light fires up her blond hair in a golden halo.

Lareck pushes up on his bed pillows for a better view. “Perfect. You’re a pensive Botticelli Madonna gazing out over the Arno River in Florence. You have, my dear, the dreamy gleam of the sassy saints that the Renaissance boys fell over each other trying to capture.”

He bends his head toward the pad and paints furiously with aggressive strokes. He puts the brush down, overcome by his creation. He takes a deep breath and sighs, rubs his eyes, and looks around. He glimpses Noah standing outside the open door in the hallway. His voice mellows in a warm greeting. “Noah, come in and sit with me.”

Noah enters and sits in a wicker chair with chipped white paint. He is mesmerized by Zoe illuminated in tropical light streaming through the window. She shifts her body nervously at being so close to him. He looks back at Lareck. “Sorry to interrupt. I forgot you have your painting session with Zoe on Wednesday afternoons.”

Lareck nods, picks up his brush, and continues his strokes on the large pad. “She’s the beautiful daughter I never had. But I’ve got to paint fast—beauty doesn’t last forever.”

Zoe gives Lareck a pert, ironic smile. “And you aren’t lasting forever. So hurry up, this is a hard pose to hold. I’m getting a muscle pull in my left calf.”

Noah looks back at Zoe. “As a poet said, nothing lasts forever, not beauty, not marriage, not even eternal love. But I’m still holding out for you on the eternal love part.”

Zoe snaps at him, “Your philosophy comes straight from the bottom of a rum bottle. Too simple, too sugary.”

Lareck huffs. “Quiet, your marital bliss is distracting me.”

Noah and Zoe stay silent as Lareck continues his strokes on the pad. From the outside hallway, the sound of approaching footsteps is heard. Hogfish appears in the doorway. He steps into the room, bobbing back and forth manically to the musical beat blasting through his earbuds.

A look of dismay spreads across Lareck’s wrinkled face. “Ah, my son pops up out of nowhere.” Hogfish doesn’t hear the words, bobbing agitatedly to his music. Lareck rolls his eyes at Noah and Zoe. “What can I say? Only that a man sends his sperm into a woman’s womb like a blind ambassador hoping to make a good deal—but a man never knows what’s going to emerge from that womb. It could be a president or a jackass.”

Hogfish screams at Lareck: “Pop! You can’t stay here! El Finito’s coming! His hurricane wind is going to blow right through this window to get you! Run!”

Lareck sighs. “What a cross I must bear. Where I sought the complexities of art, my son sought the simplicity of war. He thought that war was nothing more than a video game played in foreign countries with tanks and guns.”

Noah keeps his eyes on Hogfish. “Some men fight for their truth with paintbrushes or pens. Other men fight with bullets and bombs.”

Lareck points the sharp end of his paintbrush at Hogfish. “What’s necessary about war? The army medics rebuilt my boy’s skull with titanium plates and sent him home. Now he’s somebody I don’t know, convinced a hurricane is coming to wipe us out. I don’t know if he hears music through those damn things stuck in his ears or if he’s getting instructions from space aliens.”

Zoe walks to Hogfish in the center of the room. She stops before him and pulls out his earbuds. His eyes widen with apprehension at her close body. He shudders and stiffens. She stares into his eyes, speaking in a firm voice: “Hogfish, you’ve survived a personal hell most people can’t even imagine. I want you to know, I believe all of your fears are justified.”

Hogfish jams the earbuds back into his ears, wraps his arms around himself, and bobs violently.



Luz is ushered into the bright fluorescent-lighted autopsy room of the police morgue by a white-coated lab technician. She nods hello to the Police Chief and Moxel, standing next to a high-wheeled gurney. On the gurney’s aluminum surface is laid out the naked dead body of the man Luz found hanging in the bat tower. His skin is a waxy parchment-yellow; the sides of his head are dark gashes where his ears have been slashed off. A gaping purple hollow is in his chest, where the steel arrow was extracted. His lips are riddled with puncture holes from having his mouth sewn shut with fishing line. Luz shakes her head at the brutal sight. “Poor Bill Warren.”

The Chief holds up a micro–digital recorder. “One like this was found inside Warren’s mouth. The reason his lips were sewn shut was to hold it in. I sent that recorder to Miami for further forensics.” He sets the recorder on the gurney, next to Warren’s head. “You’re going to hear an exact duplicate of the original recording.”

The Chief presses the play button on the recorder. From the speaker, a stream of static rises, as if emanating from a deep void and traveling a great distance. Out of the static explodes an electronically altered violent voice in a scathing wail:

“My heart is a ticking bomb waiting to explode.

Your evil will bleed in the streets.

I am a suit of bones,

a vengeful skeleton stalking your island.

I discover wrongdoers bent by corruption and profit.

I am a stab in your conscience,

a knife at your throat,

an arrow in your chest.

My blood-red X of vengeance cannot be escaped.

Boogie till you bounce,

bop till you drop.

I am Bizango.”

The raging voice stops. Static noise vibrates the air.

Moxel shifts uneasily. He tries to hide his unease with a sneer of bravado as he peers down at Warren. “Now we have two of Neptune Bay’s three partners chopped up like they were attacked by a blind sushi chef. Shit-in-your-pants bizarro stuff.”

The Chief clicks off the recorder. “Bizango? It took me a while to recall this monster’s strange name. Back in the 1980s, when Luz’s father was head homicide detective here, he shot dead a man who called himself by that name. It was a big sensation. You remember that, Luz? When your father killed Bizango?”

“I was just a kid when that happened, so I didn’t know much about it at the time.” Luz takes a deep breath. “Later I was told the story. Bizango was a serial killer, thought of himself as some kind of righteous assassin. My dad tracked him to where he was hiding and shot him. Bizango had terrified the island. No one knew who he was, because he always dressed in a full-body rubber skeleton suit.”

“If this Bizango was shot dead years ago, who the hell is calling himself Bizango now?”

“My dad always said, an evil thing never dies.”

Moxel spits out a mocking laugh. “That’s mumbo-jumbo, like out of some weird old zombie movie.”

Luz stares down at the mutilated body on the gurney. “Bill Warren isn’t out of an old zombie movie. He’s lying here dead, right before our eyes. We have to deal with it.”

The Chief looks quizzically at Luz. “What kind of name is Bizango? You’re the one on the detective squad who would know that kind of thing.”

“You mean I’d know because I’m the only one who has African blood?”

“Don’t play your race card on me. Besides, you’re only half black.”

Moxel gives Luz a snarky up-and-down look. “Why don’t you try playing your gender card instead of your race card? What gender are you, anyway?”

Luz ignores Moxel and answers the Chief. “Bizango is a voodoo avenger; he kills people he regards as traitors. Dad told me that. I don’t know more, because voodoo is Haitian and I’m Cuban. We don’t practice voodoo—we practice Santería, which is different.”

“What did your father mean by traitors? Traitors of what?”

“I don’t know. After Bizango was killed, Dad was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer. Bizango was the furthest thing from his thoughts in those last days.” Luz stares at the hole in Warren’s chest. “Any information on the arrow he was shot with?”

“Same kind that was shot through the chest of Randy Dandy, but it’s not an arrow. It’s a steel spear shot from a Pelletier speargun that fires off on a CO2 cartridge with enough force to take down a great white shark. Pelletier is mostly used by military, banned for sport fishing because the fish don’t stand a chance.”

Moxel hoots with enthusiasm. “The Pelletier is awesome! I saw it in a cool James Bond movie. Bond used the speargun in an underwater duel with this other dude. Both of them were in dive gear. Righteous battle. What was the name of that movie? It had that blond chick in it whose boobs kept popping out of her swimsuit.”

Luz turns her gaze on the red X slashed across the pallid skin of Warren’s stomach. “Why didn’t they clean Bill up? That’s the least they could have done, wash the bloody X off of him.”

The Chief looks at the X. “Evidence, Luz. They’re still analyzing that X. It’s not blood.”

Moxel butts in. “What is it?”

“Spray paint. Common spray paint.” The Chief shrugs. “Our new Bizango is also a graffiti artist. Maybe he’s only a guy who thinks he’s Andy Warhol and is looking for his fifteen minutes of fame.”

Moxel hitches up his gun belt, ready for action. “Who’s this Andy Warhol? Let’s go get him!”



Floating far offshore between Key West and Cuba in his pirate-radio boat, Noah contemplates the microphone and bottle of rum on the console table before him. He swivels in his chair close to the microphone, then backs off. He picks up the bottle and takes a long slug. As the liquor burns in his throat, he looks out through the saltwater-streaked window. The vast blue ocean surrounds him. He could be the only man alive at the dawn of creation, or the only man alive at the end of the world. He leans in close to the microphone and finds his voice.

“We are in the American tropic, in a zone of constant life, death, birth, and decay. As a poet once said, ‘Nothing lasts forever, not even eternal love.’ So—here is my advice: don’t fall in love with a woman, fall in love with a town. A town doesn’t expect you to tell it when you’re coming home. A town doesn’t ask you to stop drinking. Key West is the perfect town to fall in love with. Key West has more bars than churches, schools, grocery stores, and banks put together. You’re always welcome in a Key West bar.” One of the three cell phones on the table before Noah flashes its red light with an incoming call. He punches up the call. “Go, pilgrim—you’re on pirate radio.”

A belligerent male voice spews from the big wood loudspeakers that the cell phone is wired to. “Pirate radio, my ass. You’re miles offshore, moaning about love instead of talking about what bought-off corporate-controlled commercial radio refuses to talk about.”

“You’ve got a beef, bully boy, sling it at me. Show me the rage.”

“I wanna bitch-slap all the bankster bandits and condo cowboys who are destroying the Florida Keys. The worst are those three Neptune Bay partners trying to bulldoze everything natural and put up a wall of condos that will forever block a man’s rightful view of his mother ocean.”

“Two of the Neptune partners are now dead. Didn’t you hear the news about Bill Warren found hanging in the bat tower?”

“I don’t listen to corporate-controlled news radio.”

“Well, there’s still one partner left, Big Conch. He wants to build in the proposed great-white-heron preserve. It’s not a done deal yet. Neptune Bay is coming up for an approval vote.”

“Any corrupt government official who votes approval for Neptune Bay should be hung.”

“That’s it! Show me the rage!”

“Hang ’em high! Let ’em swing by their necks!”

“You know the mantra?”

“Yeah, don’t fool with Mother Nature or—”

“—Mother Nature will fool with you!”

“Keep up the fight. Adios, Dog.”

“Next caller, go.”

A woman’s words slur across the airwaves. “Hey, turtle diddler, you’re cute when you croon about falling in love with a town. Your hot voice puts a love hex on me. I’m boiling in your turtle soup.”

“Are you stoned?”

“Am I phoned? Of course I’m phoned. I’ve been phoned all day. That’s why I phoned you, didn’t I? I want to pet your porpoise. I want to hug your dolphin. Can I show you my age?”

“Rage.”

“I’ll show you better. I’m pulling my panties down right now. See my raging p-ssy?”

“Mom, I told you never to call me here.”

“Mom? I’m not your f*ck—”

Noah cuts off the slurring voice. “Stay on point, pilgrims, no games or I’m cutting this broadcast short. I’m waiting for your call. Good, here’s a brave soul. You’re live.”

“Permian extinction. It’s sneakin’ up on us.”

“Welcome back, Nam vet.”

“You remember when Hurricane Wilma came through Key West years back?”

“We all do—lots of damage, took forever to recover from it.”

“Yeah, but the real damage wasn’t what we expected. Wilma didn’t hit us head-on with one-hundred-thirty-mile-an-hour winds, didn’t smash us with a crashin’ forty-foot-high tsunami wave. Wilma blew across the island, ripped off roofs, uprooted palm trees, then, poof, she was gone. That night, people sleepin’ in their beds dreamed that their dog was lickin’ their face and wouldn’t quit, or they dreamed they were pissin’ and couldn’t stop. People woke up with water risin’ all around them, water risin’ up out of the floors of their houses, floodin’ the streets, coverin’ the cars. It was Wilma’s sea surge from under the coral rock of the island inundatin’ everything. Like the Old Testament deluge, water just kept risin’ with nothin’ to stop it. There was panic, everyone was gonna be drowned. Key West was gonna be submerged forever, like Atlantis. Then the water stopped risin’. That was Wilma’s sneaky punch. The Permian Extinction Event will be like that. The next mega-explosion will come when least expected, annihilate us all.”

“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Mother Nature takes us out before we pollute the whole damn galaxy.”

Noah patches in another call. A brusque male voice bellows. “This is Big Conch, CEO of Neptune Bay Resort.”

“Ah, the guy who hits on my wife all the time when he isn’t busy raping the environment.”

“Don’t give me that stink load about the environment. I create jobs. What do you create? Nada! You want the Florida Keys turned back into a mosquito-infected mangrove swamp.”

“I’d rather live with mosquito bites on my ass than be imprisoned on a concrete island of condos surrounded by a dead sea.”

“You’re just a dipshit bobbing alone on the ocean, trying to get people to jerk off to phony environmental rage. The truth is, it’s all about your wife. She left you. You’re a pirate without a treasure.”

Noah punches Big Conch off the line. “Fun and games are over for today. Here’s something for my lost treasure out there, if she’s listening.” He picks up a CD. “This is a lament of love lost, sung by a man who has crawled on hands and knees over a thousand miles of broken-glass heartbreak road. Enjoy!”

Noah pushes the disc into the CD player and swivels around in his chair as the song begins. Behind him is the Haitian teenager Rimbaud Mesrine, who has been silently watching the whole time. Noah speaks in French to the boy. “You don’t understand anything that’s been said here today, do you?” Rimbaud shakes his head. Noah continues: “How old are you, kid?”

Rimbaud answers hesitantly in French. “Sixteen.”

“Then you’re old enough to understand this.” Noah cranks up the volume on the CD player.

The man singing his lament from the speakers slits open the heart of the song with a howl of pain.



High-noon sun slams down on a junkyard of abandoned boats of all types and sizes rotting in brutal tropical heat. Some boats are tilted on their sides; some are mounted on concrete blocks with weeds growing up around them; others have their once-tight wooden hulls snapped open and gaping, like prizefighters with their teeth knocked out. Overhead, in the cloudless washed-out sky, vultures glide in circles, looking down among the junked boats for any sign of a dead opportunity.

Between a row of square-hulled houseboats walks Hard Puppy, dressed in his shiny white silk suit. Hard’s white alligator-skin shoes crunch the white coral gravel underfoot as he leads three pit bulls tied to a rope. He stops next to a rusted iron ship anchor half wedged into the ground. He ties the pit bulls to the anchor. He walks back ten feet, swings around, and pulls out a Magnum. He aims the long-barreled gun at the pit bulls straining against the rope. He pulls the Magnum’s trigger. A reverberating blast shocks through the air. One of the tied pit bulls drops to the ground with a dying yelp. The two remaining dogs bark and lunge against the new dead weight of the rope restraining them.

The scent of blood and burnt metal fills the air. Hard aims the Magnum and fires again. In front of the two pit bulls, a chunk of dirt is ripped out and tossed up in a dust cloud. Hard shouts at the dogs, “Keep your asses still!” He grips the gun in both hands, aims, and fires. A bullet zings through the air, striking a pit bull between the eyes. The bullet’s sudden impact explodes the dog’s head in a spew of blood, bone, and flesh.

Behind Hard, a white Dodge Charger roars up and brakes to a stop in the gravel. Luz opens the front door and gets out. Hard swings his Magnum around in his two-handed grip and aims it at Luz. She pushes the bottom of her guayabera shirt aside, exposing her holstered Glock; she steadies her hand on the handle and calls out to Hard across the gravel expanse, “Let’s have an even fight. Killing a cop isn’t as easy as killing a helpless dog.”

Hard’s lips curl back, exposing his platinum teeth. “Man’s got a right shootin’ his own dogs.” He grins with a quick lick of his lips and glances over at the last pit bull standing. “I got one more slacker to pop off.”

“Target practice is finished. Hand over your gun.”

Hard kicks at the gravel with the tip of his alligator shoe. A puff of dust floats up. He shoots Luz a defiant stare.

Luz steps straight up to Hard. “I’m going to run a check on your gun to see the nasty places it’s been. Maybe it’s left a calling card in places where the sun no longer shines.”

Hard grips his Magnum harder. “I ain’t worried ’bout no checkin’. My hardware be clean. Better you get your head out of your ass. Get in touch with your half-nigga side. Let this whole thing slide.”

“It slides if you cop out on the Dandy Randy and Bill Warren murders.”

“Ah, colored girl, don’t be a shit-kicker. A shit-kicker sees a big ol’ pile of shit on the street and kicks it. Best you pass this Neptune Bay shit by. It could stick to your shoes—worse, stink up your life.”

“I’m kicking your shit. I’m taking you in for questioning on the two murders.”

“You crazy bitch. This black boy got nothin’ to do with offin’ white chumps. You should be sniffin’ in the direction of Big Conch’s white ass. Everybody knows Big’s the only Neptune partner left.”

“No. Maybe you partnered with Big to launder your dogfight winnings through Neptune Bay. Maybe you and Big didn’t want to share that with the other two partners. So, whiff, off go Dandy and Warren.”

A sweat breaks out across Hard’s forehead. “I ain’t scammin’ with Big. I be a respectable biz-niz man. That’s why I be wearin’ a suit in this scaldin’ sun. No other black boy as pro-fesh-shu-nal as I be.”

“Blood-money gambling on pit bulls tearing each other apart is not a profession, it’s a crime. You think you can dodge the law, moving your secret dogfights between Key West and Miami. Someday I’ll bust you on it, bust you to pieces.”

Hard turns and looks across the gravel at the whimpering pit bull roped to the anchor. Around the dog, the blood from the two sprawled dead animals has leaked out in a damp red circle. Hard raises his Magnum and points it at the whimpering pit bull. “You want that dog?”

“I don’t want a fighting dog.”

“That dog be no fighter, he be a lover. That’s why I poppin’ him. He’d rather lick his balls than fight. That’s why his name be Chicken. You want Chicken or not?”

Luz studies the pit bull squatting on its haunches in a pool of blood. The dog’s pink tongue dangles out as it whimpers; one of its ears is a gnarly stub, bitten off in a fight. The hair of the dog’s short black coat is slashed with white scars left over from the vicious bites of past battles.

Hard chuckles. “Take Chicken home to that baldheaded daughter of yours. She could use a friend.”

“I’ll take the dog.”

“Deal.”

Hard walks across the gravel. He unties the pit bull from the two dead dogs and leads it back to Luz. The sun glints off of Hard’s smiling metallic mouthful of teeth. “Now you finally got a friend for your crippled daughter.”

Luz’s knee whips up in a powerful jackknife kick straight into Hard’s groin. Hard’s Magnum flies from his hand. He grabs his groin in an anguished wail, gaping at Luz with eyes wide in shock. She rips her pistol from its holster and smacks the gun’s gorilla-grip handle against the side of Hard’s head with a loud crack. Hard drops to the ground, his feet kicking out at the gravel in pain. Luz stands above Hard, who is writhing in the dust. She aims her pistol down at him.

“You mention my daughter again, I’ll kill you!”



A line of shrimping boats is anchored along a concrete pier jutting out into Key West Harbor. The boats’ tall masts and winged outriggers are decorated with strands of twinkling white lights. On the pier, a band plays festive Caribbean music to a crowd of shrimpers, their families, and town locals gathered beneath an overhead banner declaring SHRIMP FLEET BLESSING. In the crowd are Luz and Joan with Carmen and Nina. Nina sits in her wheelchair, her brown eyes taking in the scene with nervous excitement.

Big Conch bullies his way through the center of the crowd. He holds two bottles of beer as he cocks his head back and forth, looking for someone. He spots Zoe dancing with a shrimper, her flared skirt spinning around her bare knees as the delighted partner stomps his white rubber boots to the band’s percussive rhythm. Big closes in on the shrimper and shoves him aside. The man stops dancing and sizes up Big’s imposing stature. The man slinks off. Big offers Zoe one of his two beers. She turns her back on him.

At the edge of the crowd, Hogfish wheels to a squeaky stop on his rusty bicycle. Stretched between the handlebars is the taut fishing line strung with barbed J-hooks. He jerks his head back and forth to the music he hears through the earbuds jammed into his ears and rises from the bicycle’s worn leather seat. He looks over the dancing crowd and glimpses Big following close behind Zoe as she walks quickly away from him.

Out of the darkness behind the line of docked shrimping boats, Noah’s trawler motors up. Inside the pilothouse, Noah steers his vessel between two large boats and cuts his engine. He looks through the window at the crowd on the pier. Behind him in the shadows is the slight figure of Rimbaud. Noah turns and speaks reassuringly in French: “Do what I told you and stay out of sight. Don’t go out on the deck. I’ll return soon.”

Rimbaud grabs Noah’s arm. “I’m afraid. What if they find me?”

“They won’t find you if you stay hidden inside the storage closet.”

Rimbaud’s eyes widen with fear. “They’ll find me and send me back to Haiti, where the earthquake cracked open the underworld, releasing zombies. Zombies breathing the death of cholera search for innocents to suck out their life.”

“Trust me, I’ll protect you. You won’t be sent to Haiti. I’ll come back with someone who can help us.”

Distrust crosses Rimbaud’s face as he slips away toward the storage closet.

Noah heads for the door and steps out of the pilothouse onto the deck. Anchored next to the trawler is a shrimping boat with its name painted along its side, Pat’s Pride. Pat stands on her deck, dressed in men’s jeans, shirt, and white rubber boots. She spots Noah and shouts above the raucous music from the band on the pier: “Truth Dog, we’re blessing shrimping boats here! Not pirate-radio boats! Shove off!”

Noah shouts back: “If you swear to stop net-killing endangered turtles, I’ll shove off! Until then, you can f*ck off!”

Pat turns her back on Noah and bends over. She slaps her blue-jean-covered butt with a loud smack. “Kiss it, sucky eco-boy!”

On the crowded pier, a Catholic priest appears, dressed in a long billowing red robe. The priest is followed by altar boys in starched white cloaks. The boys swing metal censers smoking with burning incense. The crowd falls silent. The band stops playing. All eyes go to the priest. He holds high a gold cross with a nailed Jesus. He looks at the long line of shrimping boats with their decorative lights blinking against the black sky. His voice booms: “Father, our shrimping boats are about to sail out again. We pray thee, Father, fill the nets of our men with thy bountiful gifts. We also beseech your Holy Mother, Mary, to shine her guiding light on our brave men, protect them from danger and stormy seas, return them home to the bosom fold of their families and loved ones.” The crowd shouts, “Amen!”

An old white-haired black shrimper walks with halting steps in front of the boats. His face is etched with deep lines from a lifetime under the sun. He holds in his hands a large fluted conch shell. He stops and raises the narrow end of the pink luminescent shell to his lips. He takes a deep breath and blows a high-pitched melancholic note.

Nina, seated in her wheelchair next to Luz, bends her head to the conch shell’s unsettling wail. She becomes agitated. Luz places her hands on Nina’s shoulders to calm her. The old shrimper blows harder into the shell, forcing a shrill note into the night air. Nina’s frail body trembles.

The old shrimper keeps blowing as women from the crowd step to the edge of the pier, facing the anchored boats. The women hold large bunches of long-stemmed white roses. They solemnly toss the flowers at the brightly painted high hulls of the boats. The roses hit the wooden hulls with soft thuds and fall below, where they scatter on the water and float around the boats. Zoe, among the women, tosses all of her roses except her last one, which she keeps, breaking off its long green stem, then securing its prominent white bloom next to her ear.

Noah jumps down from the deck of his trawler onto the pier and walks toward Zoe. He is grabbed roughly from behind. He spins around, staring straight into the face of Hogfish.

Hogfish screams urgently: “Roses can’t stop El Finito from coming! Listen to the roses talking! Chattering away like mourning widows of drowned shrimpers! They’re saying the Devil’s wind is winding up to punch the lights out of civilization! Roses are crying because the hurricane is coming!”

From behind Hogfish, at the far end of the pier, Big Conch lights the fuse of a fireworks cannon-barrel launcher. Shrieking fireworks sail high into the night sky and explode, illuminating the uplifted faces of the cheering crowd.

From inside Noah’s trawler, Rimbaud stares wide-eyed through the pilothouse window. His terrified face lights up from fireworks bursting with brilliant streamers. He cringes at the exploding sounds and twists his body in sharp turns, as if each of the flaring fireworks has him as its intended target. He falls to his knees and scrambles, with his head down, from the pilothouse out onto the deck. Fireworks whistle in the air around him; dazzling light showers down from above. He scurries to the boat’s edge and hurls himself overboard, plunging from sight beneath the water.

The crowd on the pier watches the last of the trailing light fade from the night sky. A belligerent voice calls out, “F*ck the eco-Gestapo!” The crowd turns to Pat, unfurling a canvas banner from her boat’s side railing. The banner proclaims NO TURTLE EXCLUDERS ON SHRIMP NETS! Some in the crowd break into an eruption of cheers at the sight of the banner. Pat shouts defiantly: “Listen, all of you! My family fished turtles for generations off of Key West. No eco-Gestapo can dictate to me. I’ll net turtles, harpoon turtles, hook turtles, kill turtles with my bare hands if I want. The ocean is the last free frontier, the final home of the brave.”

More cheers burst from the crowd, followed by loud boos from others. Men angrily wave their fists and shove one another, their reddened faces inches apart. Women jostle each other, screaming vulgar insults. The priest frantically waves his gold crucifix in the air, but he is ignored.

The band strikes up a sudden rhythmic dance tune. Noah breaks away from Hogfish and makes his way to Zoe. He slips his arm around her waist and spins her in a dance to the band’s beat. Some in the crowd stand back, giving Noah and Zoe room; others join in the dancing. Luz lifts Nina up from the wheelchair and sways her in her arms to the joyous rhythm.

Zoe stops dancing and pushes Noah away. “If I want to dance with you, I’ll make the choice.” She pulls out the white rose tucked behind her ear and hands it to him. “You didn’t know you were in a garden of roses when you had it.”

Noah holds the rose up and plucks off a petal. “She loves me.” He plucks off another petal with a brave grin. “She loves me not.”

“You can pluck every petal off that rose, but it won’t bring me back. Marriage is not a one-way street just going your way. The street goes both ways.” She turns and walks off, leaving Noah alone with his rose.

Along the entire length of the concrete pier, the diesel engines of shrimping boats roar to life. The crowd rushes to the pier’s edge, waving good-bye to the boats motoring away. The lights of the fleet become distant on the sea’s horizon.



Long after the fleet has disappeared and the crowd has left the pier, Noah and Luz stand alone in the night in front of Noah’s trawler. A stiff breeze off the ocean blows in, tugging at Luz’s white guayabera shirt. She looks impatiently at Noah. “It’s late; I need to get home to my family. Why did you ask me to stay behind with you?”

“I need your help with something. I didn’t want to mention it in front of Joan.”

“I don’t keep secrets from Joan. What’s so important that can’t be talked about in front of your sister?”

“I’ll show you.” Noah leads the way onto his trawler. They walk across the deck into the dark pilothouse. Noah switches on the overhead light and calls out in French, “It’s safe! No need to hide!” He waits for an answer—silence—calls out again: “This woman I brought can help.” He moves to the storage closet in the corner, pushes back its canvas curtain, and looks inside. “Damn, the boy is gone.”

“What boy?” Luz walks to the closet and peers in. “Who’s supposed to be in here?”

Noah doesn’t answer. He picks up a half-finished bottle of rum from the broadcasting table and uncorks it. He takes a swig as he stares through the pilothouse window at the ocean. “Makes no difference now who he is. He’s vanished.”



Luz steers her white Charger down the main drag of Duval Street. The flanking sidewalks are crowded with gawking tourists passing gaudy trinket shops, boisterous open-air bars crowded with long-haired motorcycle bikers, tattoo parlors filled with glassy-eyed stoned teenagers, and chattering people at outdoor restaurant tables beneath towering banyan trees. Luz keeps a vigilant eye for lowlife crack dealers, skinhead punks pimping young runaway girls from the North, and tweaked meth-heads looking to start a fight with someone, or with themselves, or with a plate-glass window.

Sitting next to Luz in the passenger seat is Chicken, the one-eared scarred pit bull. Chicken licks his chops as she takes a deep-fried conch fritter from a bag wedged between her thighs. She munches on the fritter as she continues to drive with one hand on the steering wheel. She glances over at the dog, sitting patiently on his haunches, waiting for a handout. “Chicken, you want a fritter?” The dog whines with pitiful expectation. She plucks a fritter from the bag and holds up the greasy ball to Chicken’s mouth. “Careful, don’t bite my fingers off.” The dog’s pink tongue slurps the fritter gently from between her fingers. He swallows with a loud gurgle. She pats his broad head affectionately. “You really are a lover, not a fighter. I like that in a man.”

Luz turns off Duval Street and drives out of town, past streets lined with palms shading eighteenth-century wood houses painted in bright Caribbean colors. She continues on to the outskirts of Key West, with its sleazy motels, fast-food drive-in joints, and run-down shopping centers. She heads up the Overseas Highway, crossing bridges linking the islands of the Keys. The farther Luz travels, the less man-made distractions line the highway, until, finally, there are none. On one side are the Gulf of Mexico’s turquoise-colored waters. On the other side, the vivid indigo of the Atlantic Ocean. She looks through her car’s windshield; the atmosphere is pristine, dominated by the changing light reflected from the two great bodies of water. In the pale-blue sky, spread-winged white herons sail between columns of clouds. The herons soar high on hot wind currents, then swoop down, gliding to graceful landings in a flutter of wings on distant mangrove islands dotted across the horizon.

A large billboard looms up on the side of the highway declaring COMING SOON! NEPTUNE BAY RESORT! The billboard’s visual depicts a vast resort of luxury condos, hotels, golf courses, and a yacht marina. Towering above the resort depiction is a giant image of the bearded sea god Neptune clutching a trident spear. Luz turns her car abruptly off the highway onto a dirt road leading into the center of an abandoned construction site stripped of all vegetation and empty of any people. She parks the car and gets out. Chicken follows her as she walks across a scraped-earth landscape dominated by rows of hulking, dust-covered bulldozers, earth-graders, dump trucks, and cement mixers. She continues, zigzagging between incomplete cement building foundations with rusted iron rebar struts sticking up from them. She arrives at a concrete pier jutting out into a brackish backwater inlet coming in from the Gulf of Mexico. She walks to the far end of the pier, where a canary-yellow forty-foot powerboat is tied, its high jet-exhaust chrome spoilers gleaming in the harsh sunlight.

In front of the powerboat, Big Conch sits in an aluminum slingback chair, wearing only a tight red Speedo swimsuit. His sinewy suntan-oiled body is shaved of all hair except for the dyed slick blond hair of his head. On his chest glint heavy antique Spanish medallions that dangle from a gold chain around his neck. He shucks oysters with a broad-bladed knife. Scattered around his bare feet are empty shells. Chicken trots up, sniffs the shells, and starts nibbling on them. Big looks up and greets Luz with a smirk as he nods toward Chicken. “I see they finally gave you a better partner than that Riviera redneck, Moxel. At least this one’s got a pair of balls.”

Big pulls a gnarly-shelled oyster from a wooden crate next to the aluminum chair. He deftly knifes open the shell and scrapes free its meat. He holds out the glob balanced on the knife’s blade. “You want an aphrodisiac from the sea? Neptune’s original Viagra. It’ll give you a hard-on for that hot blond-bombshell girlfriend of yours. Oh yeah, you can’t get a hard-on. What is it you get, anyway, if you can’t get a stiff dick? Come on, have an oyster. It might even make me attractive to you.”

“I just lost my appetite.”

“No appetite from stuffing fritters all day. You won’t die from a bullet to your heart but a grease hole through your gut.” Big holds the knife up to his mouth. He lets the oyster balanced on the blade slide off between his lips.

Luz looks over at the name emblazoned on the powerboat’s sleek hull: Big Conch.

She looks back at Big. “Since you know so much about the sea, did you know that if a conch’s johnson is bitten off by a hungry eel, the conch grows himself a new johnson?”

“Is that why you eat conch fritters all day, hoping to grow yourself a wiener?” Big glances over at Chicken, crunching a mouthful of oyster shells. “Dumb bastard’s gonna puke.” He turns back to Luz. “You didn’t drive all the way out here to give me a lesson on the sex life of the conch. What the hell do you want?”

“Dandy Randy and Bill Warren were both murdered.”

“So were the Kennedy brothers. Ancient news. Get to it. You’re here because you figure I killed my two partners.”

“No. I’m here because I believe whoever did kill your partners is now after you. You should back off developing this resort and lay low.”

“Lay low? Never. I don’t give a shit if half the people accuse Neptune Bay of destroying the habitats of everything from white herons to blind manatees to one-armed nuns. The other half of the people love me for this hundred-million-dollar resort I’m developing. It means jobs to build it, jobs to sell it, jobs to service it. We’re coming off the worst economic times in the history of the Keys since the Great Depression, and I’m the man leading the way out with my Neptune Bay.”

Chicken bumps up against Big’s knees and vomits a gut-load of half-eaten oyster shells onto Big’s bare feet. “Get out of here, you one-eared mutt!” Big kicks the dog in the ribs. He shouts at Luz as she pulls the yelping Chicken away: “And don’t you come around trying to trick me by pretending you care about saving my hide from some psycho killer. And I damn well don’t need lecturing about how conchs grow their dicks, especially since you don’t have a dick and balls. Hell, you no longer even have tits. You’re a sorry-ass situation.”

Luz glares at Big. “You’ve got balls … balls for brains.”

“I’m a sympathetic man, so I won’t respond to that, but answer me this: why, after your mastectomy, didn’t you get some fake titties? You’re a good-looking woman. You’d be a knockout if you bolted on a pair of Vegas-showgirl silicon hooters. That way you wouldn’t look so much like a …”

“Dyke.”

“Like a guy trying to be tough but he’s a punk.”

Luz’s eyes narrow. She nods at the thick gold chain glinting around Big’s neck. “Un mono que lleva cadenas de oro es todavía un mono.”

“Speak American.”

“A monkey wearing gold chains is still a monkey.”

Big roars with laughter. “Fu-f*ck … ing … monkey. That’s great. A goddamn f*cking monkey.” His laughter turns to a snarl as he jumps up and slashes the blade of his knife in the air. “I’m not a f*cking monkey, you dumb dyke! I’m a goddamn two-hundred-pound male gorilla with five-pound balls and a swinging foot-long dick! Don’t you ever forget it!”

Luz faces Big. “I can see from the tiny bump in that Speedo you’re wearing that there isn’t much swinging between your legs. You don’t have enough juice to knock up a tick.”



Luz nervously chews on a conch fritter as she watches the Duval Street night action through the windshield of her parked Charger. She keeps her eyes on the front of a nightclub. A neon rainbow sign arches above the nightclub’s doorway: LITTLE ORPHAN TRANNY’S. The sign’s garish pastel light reflects on three six-foot-tall drag queens with big hair, wearing sequined ball gowns, sashaying back and forth on the sidewalk on six-inch-high stiletto heels. The queens wink false eyelashes, blow kisses, and call out in basso male voices at passing locals, tourists, and high rollers to enter the nightclub and experience the wild side.

Inside her car, Luz slips another fritter from the paper bag between her legs. Chicken sits beside her, expecting a treat. Luz hands the fritter to Chicken, and he tongues it from her fingers. She continues watching the people going in and out of the nightclub, looking for drug pushers and their clientele of tweaked, cranked, and cracked users and abusers. She flips on her car’s AM-FM radio and switches through the channels until she locks into a weak station. She turns up the volume and listens to the animated voices of Noah’s broadcast coming in through the static.

“Hey, Truth Dog, I’m a Key West shrimper.”

“Welcome, shrimper. You’re on pirate radio.”

“It pisses me off that so many of your callers are against commercial shrimpers and long-liners here in the Keys. We’re seen as rednecks who don’t give a shit about marine ecology. Hell, we’re the ones who make a living from the sea. You won’t find stronger guardians of marine life than us.”

“I’m with you. Many of the old-timers here were the original ecologists, against the slaughter of the turtles, whose meat was being turned into steaks and soup, their shells made into combs and toothbrushes.”

“Right, we were the first to use excluders on our boats. We were the first to use safety O-hooks instead of J-hooks on our longlines.”

“My rage is against those who refuse to do that. You know how many endangered female leatherback turtles are left laying their eggs in the sands of Florida’s east coast?”

“Not many.”

“Fewer than two hundred. Down from tens of thousands. Turtles have been around a million years and we’re wiping them out. We’re snagging, tangling, drowning, hooking the last of the turtles every day with gill nets, drift nets, drag nets, and J-hook longlines.”

“And the plastic bags?”

“Don’t get me started! Billions of bags dumped into the ocean each year, choking, gagging, and strangling turtles to death!”

“Goddamn shame.”

“God had nothing to do with it. Man did it.”

Luz cuts off Noah’s radio voice, her attention caught through her windshield by a man and a teenaged girl down the street, coming out of the Trouble in Paradise cocktail lounge. The man and girl walk away with their backs to Luz. She blurts out to Chicken, sitting next to her, “That’s my Carmen! She snuck out of the house!” Chicken licks his chops for more fritters.

Luz starts her Charger and steers it onto Duval Street, following behind the man and teenager. The girl’s long black hair hangs down to the top of a yellow miniskirt hugging her bottom so tightly that her firm butt cheeks are prominently outlined. The man runs his hand over her butt as she walks.

“I know my own daughter when I see her. I shouldn’t have let her paint those damn fingernails. I knew it would lead to no good.”

The man and teenager turn suddenly off of Duval Street toward Grunt Bone Alley. Luz presses down on the accelerator pedal and speeds up. A fast-moving line of hooting college kids on loud mopeds shoots out from the alley. Luz honks her horn at the riders blocking her car, but the mopeds keep coming. She spots an opening in the line and guns into Grunt Bone Alley. The narrow lane is deserted except for cars parked along its sides. She pulls over and cuts her engine. She studies the parked cars. Chicken looks at the bag of fritters and whines. She pats Chicken’s head. “Shush. They’re around here somewhere.”

In the dark distance of the lane, there is no movement except from a rusted 1961 Pontiac GTO parked in front of a row of garbage cans. The GTO slightly bounces on its tires. Luz keeps her gaze fixed on it. In the car’s back window, a man’s head suddenly pops up in silhouette. The head quickly disappears back down.

“He’s raping Carmen in the back seat!”

Luz jumps from her car and runs down the alley to the GTO. She yanks open the car’s back door and shines her flashlight beam in on a man’s bare white ass as his body humps up and down on the teenager beneath him. Luz grabs the man’s hair with one hand and jerks his head around. She beams the flashlight into his eyes. “You’re under arrest for raping a teenager!”

The surprised man yells, “What the f*ck are you talking about?”

“The girl’s only sixteen!”

“Like hell! She’s eighteen!”

Luz swings her beam at the girl spread-eagled on her back beneath the man. Her long black hair is tangled over her face. Her bare breasts heave from rapid breathing. Her skirt is pushed up and her panties are pulled down. In the dark V between her naked thighs glistens a worm of spilled cum. The teenager shakes the tangled hair away from her face. Luz stares at the face brightly lit in the flashlight beam. The teenager is not Carmen.

The girl glares at Luz. “I can prove I’m eighteen. My driver’s license is in my purse.”

Luz takes a deep breath. “No, you’re not eighteen. I recognize you. You’re the Munoz girl. I know your family. I was at your Quince party two years ago. You’re just seventeen.”

“That was three years ago! I’m eighteen now!”

Luz steps out of the car and looks at the man. “Pull your pants up, you chicken-hawk bastard.”

The man gets out of the car. He shoves the still-hard stub of his prick beneath his underpants, hitches up his blue jeans, and winks at Luz. “I bet you wish you could whack off a piece of her yourself. She’s not underaged. She’s street legal. You can’t arrest me. Can’t do a f*cking thing.”

“Don’t count on it. I see you with her again, I’ll toss you into lockup, where your new boyfriends will be waiting for your white ass. Get the hell out of here!”

The man takes off running. The teenager climbs out of the car. Luz grabs her wrists and handcuffs her.

“You can’t take me prisoner! What are you doing! I didn’t do anything wrong!”

Luz stays silent. She marches the teenager to the Charger, shoves her into the back, and slams the door. In the front seat, Chicken turns around and puts his front paws on the seat separating him from the teenager. He cocks his one ear, wanting to lick her hello with his tongue. Luz jumps into the car next to Chicken. She looks into the rearview mirror at the teenager in the back.

The handcuffed girl stares defiantly. “This is illegal. You can’t do this. My dad’s brother is a big-time lawyer in Miami. Manny Munoz—you ever heard of him? He’ll sue you!”

“Let him sue.”

“And he’ll sue you for having this mangy mutt in a cop car. I bet that’s against cop rules. Hey, but this isn’t a cop car! What’s going on?”

“I’m not a cop. I’m a plainclothes detective.”

Luz starts the Charger and drives off. She hears the teenager crying in the back seat. Luz weaves through dark back streets until she arrives before the twelve-foot-high bullet-shaped concrete monument lit up in the car’s headlights. Bold black-painted words declare SOUTHERNMOST POINT CONTINENTAL U.S.A.—90 MILES TO CUBA.

Luz drives behind the monument, where the street abruptly ends and the Atlantic Ocean begins. She turns off the car’s engine and rolls down her side window. The ocean’s surface ahead is a black mirror in the night. A rush of salt-scented air fills the car. She looks in the rearview mirror at the crying teenager. “You smell that?”

The teenager sniffles. “Please don’t tell my parents about my boyfriend. I beg you. He’s thirty-two. They’ll kill me.”

“Take a deep breath. Smell the air.”

“It’s salty.”

“It’s the air of Cuba blowing in from across the Florida Strait.”

“I beg you not to tell my parents.”

“That’s the air of your great-grandparents. People who immigrated to Key West in the eighteen hundreds with nothing and built a life. Hardworking people who had pride and morals. People who brought those qualities with them.”

“I’ll just die if you tell my parents.”

“The problem now is, no pride, no morals.”

“Listen, lady, we’re friends, right? I remember you at my Quince. You were there with your girlfriend.”

“Not girlfriend. Life partner. Love of my life.”

“Whatever.”

Luz turns on the car radio. She switches through the stations, playing rock, country, and Latin music. She stops on the voice of Noah coming in. She glances at the girl in the rearview mirror. “Do you know who this is?”

“Isn’t he that pirate guy?”

“Yes.”

“Nobody I know cares about him.”

“You should care. He’s about saving what counts. He’s fighting for what good is left in this world for your generation.” Luz faces the girl. “Listen to Noah, then I’ll let you go.”

“You won’t tell my parents about what happened?”

“I won’t tell them if you learn something here tonight.”

Luz turns up the volume on Noah’s voice.

The girl slumps in the back corner of the car. Her face turns sullen as Noah’s words crackle from the radio.